TL;DR: The Lowdown is a sharp, funny, and deeply human Tulsa noir that uses Ethan Hawke’s beautifully flawed truth-chaser to explore power, guilt, and the cost of caring too much. It’s hilarious, uncomfortable, and sneakily devastating, with performances and writing that linger long after the credits roll.
The Lowdown
I went into The Lowdown expecting a prestige-y political thriller with some dusty journalism clichés, maybe Ethan Hawke in Serious Actor Mode™, pacing around with a notebook and a whiskey, doing his best All the President’s Men cosplay. What I got instead was something way stranger, way funnier, and sneakily more devastating. This is one of those shows that disarms you with jokes, lulls you into thinking you’re watching a shaggy-dog noir riff, then quietly slides a scalpel between your ribs when you’re not looking.
At the center of it all is Lee Raybon, played with beautifully unkempt conviction by Ethan Hawke. Raybon is a self-described “truthstorian,” which might be the most perfect fake job title I’ve heard in years. He’s part historian, part investigative journalist, part conspiracy gremlin, and part guy who absolutely owns a corkboard with string connecting faces like he’s auditioning for a meme. He insists he’s chasing truth; everyone around him suspects he’s chasing chaos. Both things can be true.
The show, created by Sterlin Harjo, takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that location is not just flavor text. Tulsa is baked into the DNA of this story. The streets, the politics, the generational guilt, the unresolved violence simmering under polite smiles. You can feel the weight of history pressing down on every conversation, even when the dialogue is cracking jokes or deliberately undercutting its own importance.
Raybon is not a heroic figure in the traditional sense. He’s messy. His marriage is a wreck. His finances are a joke. His relationship with his daughter is loving but dangerously irresponsible. He drags her into situations she absolutely should not be in because, in his mind, the pursuit of truth outweighs basic parental common sense. Watching him justify this is painful in the way only real human rationalizations are painful.
And yet, I couldn’t stop rooting for him. Not because he’s right all the time. He’s often very wrong. But because he keeps going. He keeps asking questions even when everyone around him is begging him to sit down and shut up.
The central mystery revolves around the death of Dale Washberg, the troubled son of a powerful local family. Officially, Dale died by suicide. Unofficially, Raybon can’t shake the feeling that something doesn’t add up. Complicating matters is the fact that Raybon wrote an article that may have contributed to Dale’s downward spiral. So now this investigation isn’t just about exposing corruption; it’s about guilt, accountability, and whether telling the truth can sometimes do real harm.
The supporting cast is absurdly stacked and used with surgical precision. Keith David plays Marty, a grizzled private investigator whose weary pragmatism acts as a counterbalance to Raybon’s manic idealism. Every line Keith David delivers sounds like it’s been aged in a bourbon barrel. He doesn’t so much speak as dispense moral weather reports.
Then there’s Kyle MacLachlan as Donald Washberg, a walking embodiment of polished menace. MacLachlan has always excelled at playing powerful men who smile while ruining lives, and here he’s in peak form. Donald is smooth, polite, and radiates the kind of entitlement that comes from generations of unchallenged authority.
Jeanne Tripplehorn shows up as Betty Jo, Donald’s ex-wife, and she absolutely steals every scene she’s in. She’s reckless, wounded, sharp-tongued, and fully aware of the mess she’s part of. Her chemistry with Hawke feels dangerous in the way only two deeply broken adults can feel dangerous together.
And then there’s Peter Dinklage as Wendell, Raybon’s former business partner, who serves as the show’s most brutally honest voice. His assessment of Raybon’s work as “a junior high collage” might be the single most accurate takedown of amateur investigative obsession I’ve heard on television.
What makes The Lowdown sing is its tonal dexterity. This show is genuinely funny. Not sitcom funny, not quippy Marvel funny, but character-driven, awkward, situational funny. Raybon gets beaten up repeatedly. He’s thrown into trunks. He stumbles into private meetings like a human liability clause. By the end of the season, he looks like a man who’s been dragged through the underbelly of America by his ankles.
But beneath the humor is a deep seriousness about power, race, and historical amnesia. Harjo never lets us forget that Raybon is a white man poking around in stories that involve Indigenous land, Black-owned businesses, and generational trauma he can never fully understand. The show is painfully aware of the “white savior” energy Raybon gives off, and it calls him on it repeatedly. One character’s line about “white men that care” being “the saddest of the bunch” landed like a gut punch disguised as a joke.
This is where The Lowdown feels like a thematic cousin to Harjo’s earlier work, even if it’s not a direct continuation. It’s about systems. About who gets to tell stories. About how good intentions don’t erase historical context. Raybon wants to believe that persistence equals righteousness, but the show keeps asking whether that belief is naive, arrogant, or both.
What I loved most is that The Lowdown doesn’t offer easy answers. The mystery doesn’t resolve into a clean moral victory. The truth, when it emerges, is complicated and unsatisfying in the way real truth often is. Raybon doesn’t ride off into the sunset vindicated. He limps forward, bruised, older, and still unsure what exactly he’s fighting for.
By the time the final episode rolled around, I realized this wasn’t really a show about journalism or conspiracies at all. It’s about aging. About relevance. About the fear that your best work is behind you and the desperate hope that one more fight might mean something. Raybon keeps barking at a tree that might not have a cat in it, not because he’s certain the cat exists, but because stopping would mean admitting the barking was never the point.
The Lowdown is one of those rare series that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and unresolved tension. It’s messy in the way people are messy. Funny in the way pain often is when you’ve lived with it long enough. And quietly profound without ever announcing itself as Important Television.
I laughed a lot. I winced more than once. And when it ended, I felt that familiar, bittersweet ache that comes from spending time with characters who feel uncomfortably real.
